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I had a lot of fun with this, although I stressed myself out once in a while.

My approach to making this was insane. I pretty much just worked on anything that popped into my head, dropping essential game logic scripts in favour of making the robot's heads explode. Fun, but it is a miracle that this actually made it to a playable state. This also showed me that the visuals are usually more important to me than the gameplay(at least in terms of what to work on at any given point), which is most likely because I've been meddling with 3d art for a long time but only learned how to do any coding last year. I kind of love programming, it is immensely satisfying to have several scripts work together without (m)any hiccups, but it also stresses me out in a weird way where I get too excited(anxious?) to continue writing them and have to take a walk or something.

Next time(and there will absolutely be a next time, if I can fit it into my schedule in any way) I would like to be part of a team or at least work together with anyone else. This jam I was pretty much entirely isolated(apart from this forum). Partly because I wanted to see what I could actually accomplish on my own and partly because I am terrified of interacting with people I don't know. I joined the slack today, might start lurking a bit. Test the waters.

Other things I should improve on for next time:

- make a list, stick to it

- get something working but not pretty done first, instead of the opposite

- read something about the basics of game design, until now I've pretty much operated on instinct

- be less rambly

Thanks to anyone who has given my little game a try and please, if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, let me know. I plan to continue working on it, maybe rebuild it...at a much slower pace.

Original post:

Hey! So, I decided to use this jam to make my first actual video game.

Until a week ago I had only ever made small test projects in Unity, usually following tutorials. This has finally given me the motivation to finish a thing(?).

The concept:

Randomly generated robots enter a room, move around and leave eventually. Sometimes they pick up an item and wander off with it. Which is bad since it's your job to make sure all the items stay put.

At any time you can open a menu which allows you to recreate a robot's design. If the robot you made and the actual robot thief match you get points and the item back.

You lose when all items are gone forever(you can only get an item back for a certain amount of time once it's been stolen) or the game ends after a set time, getting points for remaining items.

Theme:

It's the (robot) future and you work at a...trash museum? You job is to keep the automated cleaning crew in line.

Wow, making this is a blast, even though I doubt that the result will be a fun game. It'll be a game though.

Here's a wall of images for you:

A robot with some random parts(head, chip, wheels - the torso and arms are always the same):

A hilarious image from an earlier point in development:

The robots move using a node system(and constantly clip through each other):

What the game currently looks like(everything apart from the robots is still placeholder):

The recall screen:

The heads(last one isn't going to be in the random rotation):

Attachments(these are on the robot's backs):

Locomotion modules:

Still lots of things to do!

- finish the game logic(game over state, score, lots of other small and big things)

- make more parts so the robots are not as similar

- make the coloured textures for heads and "feet", hook them up.

- make models and textures for the room(level)

- improve UI(layout, visuals)

- "balance"

- music?, sound effects(most likely not)

Want to help? I need:

- ideas for easily distinguishable(and at this point easy to make) parts for the robots

- ideas for items the robots could try to steal, so far my theme is: "stuff that could be considered trash maybe(by a robot - or anyone)?"

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This is a great idea presented with lots of character (lovely menus, world-building, cute robots etc) - you could probably polish this up and sell it as a mobile game and do very well . The only major issue really is that it needs a bit of a learning curve so you can get used to the UI and the various robot combinations.

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Love the presentation but I had no idea what I was supposed to do at all gameplay-wise, and immediately got overwhelmed. Left click to open a menu feels WRONG somehow, because as someone who didn't know the rules my first instinct was to try to click everything.

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I really enjoyed the menu, and the general look and feel of the robots. However, I had a hard time knowing what to do, even after reading the how to play page. I got a really bad score, but still had some fun making the robots look different and watching them animate around stealing stuff.

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I'll echo most of the other people here and say that I really like the presentation and the basic idea for gameplay (not many games out there where you have to watch for thieves!). As mentioned by the other people, an easier start would probably be a good idea; I immediately understood how things worked, but had to watch 5-10 robots from the very beginning and didn't get anything right. Starting with 1-3 robots with a big visual diversity would be a good introduction to the idea/UI!

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Okay, I'm back to tinkering with this. Had to take a break after Wizardjam, and then one after LudumDare.

I started working on a tutorial, it needs a lot of adjustments to the code to be able to control stuff(which can just do it's thing during a normal game). So, that might take a while.

For now I changed the game so that you start out with one robot in the room. The number of robots increases at certain thresholds(2, 5, 10, 17, 25...). This should help with being overwhelmed early on. Still need to tweak it though, right now the start might be a little too slow.

Then I changed the way robots are generated from full randomness(random roll every time a new robot is made) to a queue system where it shuffles a list of all heads(/body parts/feet/colour) and then adds the first few to a queue and uses that queue when deciding what things to use for new robots. It helps prevent all robots in the room having the same heads/whatever.

I also hacked together a custom shader to be able to colour only certain parts of a texture, that way I won't need separate textures for every colour variation. Probably should have worked that way from the beginning, but shaders always seemed far too mysterious to tackle.

Just hooked it up. Works well and now the robot heads are coloured too.

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- Robots stay in the room longer after they've stolen a thing. If there is a robot carrying a thing in the room already, they stay even longer. This stacks and can get potentially silly.

- The Robots now seek out items. Before they were just randomly bouncing from node to node, now the game tries to always send at least one robot to a node that actually has a thing to steal.

- The chance for an item to be stolen has a base value but now there is also an override value that rises over time and increases the chance of a theft from a certain time onwards, capping at a 100% chance after 60 seconds.

The first change makes the game easier and more fair(?), the other two try to prevent you from being able to "win"(with a negative score) without doing anything.

I also added a really boring tutorial that is pretty much just you following the instructions on/clicking through a bunch of text boxes.

Oh, and more game over texts. Forgot about those, they still require some tweaking.